Trevor Milton Out of Nikola Motors
freightwaves.com
freightwaves.com
> In September 2020, two days after Nikola established ties with General Motors, short seller Hindenburg Research released a report accusing Milton of making false statements and characterizing Nikola Motor Company as "an intricate fraud" over many years.[4] Nikola stock fell by 8 percent that day, and fell an additional 15 percent the following day after Milton failed to deliver his rebuttal as he previously promised on Twitter.[8][9][10] Further verification by Bloomberg and Financial Times confirmed some of the details presented in the report.[11][12] As of September 12, 2020, Nikola Motor Company was being investigated with regard to a shareholder lawsuit by at least one law firm for possible fraud as detailed in the report from short seller Hindenberg (most of which referred to statements and actions by Milton). [13] On September 14, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal all reported that the US Department of Justice joined the SEC in the investigation related to potential securities fraud.
Btw: when the Hindenburg report was published, it was also discussed on hn[1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/nikola-earnings-only-revenue...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=my08ZINPgx8&ab_channel=CNBCT...
Oof. And he still owns 20% of a company created via SPAC.
How does any of this work? How has this passed any diligence?
Just a miracle
Also, does anyone remember he promised a new battery with 50% more capacity than current lithium ones?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/11/24/nikola-m...
I see FT has covered also this side of story:
https://www.ft.com/content/dc4b3e05-bf7c-482c-9241-5296dfb1d...
Just for this promises the owner deserves a "good thrashing".
Preventing million dollar corporations from going public is an extremely ham-fisted way of policing/preventing scams.
Imagine, Facebook's valuation was less than $100 million at one point, and people considered it exuberant back then. Factor of 1000 difference even with the IPO valuation. The mind boggles.
IMHO it's very possible Nikola could become GMs EV brand, similar to Polestar for Volvo. And now with GM representative being the new chairman, it's looking more like it.
It's not clear that the former is true, and it's pretty clear that the latter is not.
Wow. I wonder if he "resigned" or jumped ship. Either way, it doesn't look good.
Theranos 2.0?
All of this reminds me that I think too logically as an engineer. There are a lot of people out there who don't think the same way and there's a lot to learn in understanding how they view things.
It's great to have a vision, but dangerous to confuse the vision with reality.
Fuel cell vehicles have been around for a long time, and I presume it's not that difficult to put a basic prototype together with amount of capital available to Nikola.
Mr. Milton said in a statement that “the focus should be on the company and its world-changing mission, not me. So I made the difficult decision to approach the board and volunteer to step aside.”
As somebody following EV, I always considered them a joke company. But then the IPO and all of a suddend were mentioned as a major competitor just on the heels of Tesla. It was insane.
Literally listening to Trever Milton for 5min makes it clear that he was a major bullshit artist. I don't know how people didn't see that. Pretty much nothing he said made sense or was consistant.
His resignation post[0] includes "I intend to defend myself against false allegations" so most likely the resignation reason is not the company, but personal allegations. Apparently there is a NYT article incoming.
[0] https://twitter.com/nikolatrevor/status/1307927801966866438
Their business model would make money even if they started the fleet with gas powered trucks, doing it with self manufacturered hydrogen powered vehicle is the major doubt at this point perhaps.
That might help if he actually knew anything about technology though...
> "The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."
> That might help if he actually knew anything about technology though...
Or maybe that would make him less confident! :)
Perhaps the guy didn't really understand the things he was supposed to explain.
That's his whole stick. He is a bullshit artists, his whole job is to sound confident and sell bullshit.
> Their business model would make money even if they started the fleet with gas powered trucks, doing it with self manufacturered hydrogen powered vehicle is the major doubt at this point perhaps.
So they buy trucks and then resell them with the Nikola brand? How would that make them a good buissness.
Hydorgen trucks will not be out for many years, Toyota and Daimlre can do it, sure as hell Nikola couldn't.
And by 2025 when people talk about hydrogen trucks battery tech already made those designs totally uncompetitive.
Here, I have this nice bridge, would you like to buy it, perhaps via a SPAC?
Their business model seemed to be centered around building out a hydrogen fueling station network, which is phenomenally complicated. Tesla built out an electric charger network, but that was not particularly technically challenging. Lots of legwork to work with local zoning and businesses, sure, but it’s still just fancy chargers on the electric grid. Building out a giant system to produce hydrogen and safely fill vehicles with it? Again, I have a nice bridge here for sale.